2020-11-03
Establishing a green belt around Perth and promotion of decentralization would be a more sustainable growth paradigm
By Rob Delves, Green Issue Co-editor
Decentralisation becomes important to the debate about strategic development in WA because sustainable development needs to be about where people live (distribution) as much as the rate and size of population growth ‒ and I believe that we Greens have more consensus about the WHERE than about the HOW MANY for a better WA.
There are no simple ‘single bullet’ solutions to achieving a sustainable population in Australia. Balancing the need for some population growth with the fundamental need to significantly reduce environmental impacts represents a complex challenge but one that is achievable via an integrated economic, population and environmental strategy. Such a strategy must involve a range of considerations but one must relate to population distribution. The population discourse in Australia must not only be about how many people but also where they will live. An important part of a sustainable population strategy must involve working towards a better balance of population distribution and the distribution of resources.
Australia has one of the most spatially concentrated populations of any nation. 65% of us live in the six capital cities – in WA the capital city dominance is even more extreme, with 79 % living in Perth. In the last 20 years, 85% of WA’s population growth has been in Perth. This distinctive pattern has been remarkably stable over the past 150 years. Concerns about the distribution of the Australian population and the imbalance between urban and rural areas go back to the early years of Federation. It lay behind the initiation of land settlement schemes and soldier settlement schemes. Decentralisation didn’t work very well then and still doesn’t, despite nearly everyone claiming to be in favour of it. However, from the 1970s the discussion on decentralisation gathered momentum due to rapid growth and emerging diseconomies in Australian cities and concerns about lack of decent services and economic opportunity in rural and regional Australia. The discussion about decentralisation began to focus on the relocation of manufacturing and service activities into non-metropolitan areas, rather than on the extension of agriculture.
Greens should seek alternatives to the scenario of continued minimal growth (or even decline) of regional centres and very rapid growth in Perth, especially if this continues to be dominated by low-density, car-dependent sprawl, that engulfs more and more bushland and farmland at the urban fringe, resulting in a Los Angeles-type sprawl of nearly 200km from north to south. Moreover, if Perth continues to be home to something like the 79% of the population, this will mean that regional towns will lack decent services, jobs and other economic and cultural opportunities needed to retain their young people and attract migrants.
Our alternative strategy should have two parts:
1, A GREEN BELT TO RESTRICT THE GROWTH OF PERTH
Firstly, slow down the growth of Perth, especially growth that involves further expansion at the urban fringes. I suggest a key policy to achieve this is to establish a wide green belt around all of Perth and support this with several green wedges radiating out to the green belt. This will seriously restrict the land available for new low-density housing that locks in car-dependence.
Three U.S. states ‒ Oregon, Washington, and Tennessee ‒ require their largest cities to establish so-called “urban growth boundaries” to limit sprawl through the establishment of planned green belts. However, the best-known green belt is the one established around London in the 1940s. Though not without its controversies, it is credited with stopping the rapid sprawl of London and encouraging population growth into New Towns in the surrounding counties during the post-war boom.
A green belt policy aligns with Greens values and policies in at least two important ways:
i. Preserving important bushland and farmland.
A green belt is important for the ecological health of any region, especially one facing pressure for its metropolis to spread rapidly. It keeps the surrounding watershed vegetated to stop erosion and improve the water supply, and produce a cooling effect for the city in summers, and hopefully increase the rainfall in semi-arid areas. The various plants and trees in green belts serve as organic sponges for various forms of pollution, and as storehouses of carbon dioxide to help offset global climate change. Of course, a city with green wedges and a green belt also provides its residents with much better opportunities for recreation and connection to nature.
ii. Promoting a better mix of housing and transport options.
Perth is dominated by low density detached housing developments typically located with no relation to jobs and services – apart from the residents being forced to own a car to get to everywhere and anywhere on increasingly congested roads and freeways. Once a green belt is established, it means that nearly all future urban growth will need to be infill and consolidation – granny flats, sub-dividing, town houses, apartments, etc…. Mixed use, medium and high density developments around transport hubs are encouraged – they are a core ingredients of our Sustainable Settlements and Transport policies. This in turn makes it easier to promote the green transport modes of walking, cycling and public transport as it aims to locate jobs and services much closer to where people live.
2. PROMOTE DECENTRALISATION BY REGIONAL JOB CREATION PROGRAMS
Secondly, the government must lead the way to promote strong regional centres by Green New Deal types of job creation projects in manufacturing and services located in key regional centres that offer the best possibilities. Ross Garnaut argues that the Bunbury-Collie region and Karratha-Port Hedland stand out as two of the most attractive.
The Greens’ Pathway to Recovery program published in May this year does contain important elements of regional Green Jobs growth. One example is the pathways to 100% renewable energy:
The Greens will also set the course for 100% renewables by 2030. We’ll prioritise the construction of the publicly owned transmission network, beginning with a Grid Transformation Fund. We’ll put in place the infrastructure for 100% renewable energy, unleashing over $700 billion in new clean energy generation investments. This would allow us to open up new parts of Australia through ‘renewable energy zones’, not only to run Australia on 100% renewables, but to establish ‘clean energy export hubs’ to export our wind and sunlight to the world.
Another is “Green Steel”:
There are promising alternatives in development, the most exciting of which is using ‘green hydrogen’ (i.e. hydrogen produced by renewables) in place of coking coal, opening up huge opportunities for regions that currently rely on mining coal. The Greens would invest in research and development and would create an additional Green Steel Innovation Fund, specifically targeted at supporting a transition to green steel for carbon intensive regions and making sure people who rely on the industries have opportunities and jobs through the transition.
I also believe it is important to make public investment in service-sector jobs central to these decentralisation projects. Services in Health, Education, Social Housing and other aspects of the caring economy are particularly important, as they provide many more jobs than manufacturing per million dollars invested and they are essential to making regional centres liveable, vibrant and attractive.
Header photo: London’s green belt. Credit: Evening Standard
[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]